Switzerland was “neutral” not neutral. The Swiss certainly crossed into the complicit side quite often, profiting from the Nazi regime, laundering their looted gold and closing their borders to fleeing Jews.
This is such a landmine topic, because most countries did this, including the UK and the US; see e.g. the MS St. Louis. This is why there are several "heroes of the resistance" that in modern parlance are "people smugglers", forging credentials and visas in order to help people escape.
Today you see exactly the same hostile attitudes to non-white refugees of basically every war except Ukraine.
Many people in the British Empire were told to fight for the mother country or even to preserve the empire (which was largely gone by the seventies, with some major territories becoming independent in the later 1940s.)
“Go save the Jews” was hardly a motivating factor for any nation in the war.
Difficult to pin something as all consuming as WW2 on "about" anything, but we can look at who fired the first shots, which was clearly the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the east and the German invasion of Poland in the West (followed shortly after by the USSR invading Poland and later Finland from the other direction.)
It is not at all a given that, had Germany stayed within her international borders, that the Holocaust would have on its own triggered WW2. After all, mass murder in the Congo Free State didn't trigger invasion of Belgium.
IDK if things have changed but generally the whole narrative in the US is presented as unwitting yankies discovering the horrors of the death camps. It's debated how much some levels of the government knew, but it certainly wasn't public knowledge in the US.
Well, that or fighting the Japanese.
Patriotism and threat seem to have been the main motivators for most people in the west.
That is 1930s pre-war Germany and Austria; and around 550k people by the most generous calculation. Yes, the world wronged them. But you cannot say death camps happened because the US didn’t hand out enough visas.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (home of 3-3.5m Jews) and in 1941 the USSR (home of another 1-2m Jews) no one was being forced to leave (or live) anymore. People were being killed with bullets to the head or back, and when this started to be unbecoming/too inefficient, the German state devised an industrial approach to the killing of humans.
Perhaps that's because most of those refugees could more easily shelter in neighboring countries that they are more culturally similar to... if shelter was actually the primary thing that they were seeking.
Interesting connection, as her father was a foreign member of the Nazi party (while living in Brazil) and had lied about his Nazi affiliation in the past. When he moved back to Germany, he joined the main party.
I think, once you read about each individual country and what they did before/during/after WW2, it seems like not a single country on the European continent can be considered "neutral". So maybe with this lens, Switzerland was "the most neutral" if you compare with others?
And yes, actual historical events and motivations of past actors matter.
Yes, there were multiple fully on-the-nazi side countries, Swiss were not them. That does not make the comparison you made meaningful.
Yeah, even when I tried my best to, apparently the labels just fire up too much emotions. I've removed the country names completely as it's irrelevant to what I was trying to discuss.
> Equating Russians with Jews is particularly ugly here
I didn't do anything of the like in the original text, but good try!
So I assume that if you open your borders to all fleeing citizens, that's neutral, and if you close it to all, that's neutral as well.
Private Swiss banks accepted money from both nazis and jews alike, thats true. Sounds neutral to me. They have anonymous numbered accounts here, practice for local citizens used long before WWII. Together the reasons why it ended up as it did.
That still counts as neutral, as does Sweden's activities. Switzerland interned allied airmen and was even bombed but stayed out of the war.
There is a wonderful quote from the Irish parliament. The Irish government wanted to be neutral, but one of the politicians asked "but who shall we be neutral against ?" (By the way, the nature of the Irish Free State's "neutrality" remains controversial to this day, and again, I could point to examples both ways.) It is hard to think of any fully neutral countries in WW2, partly due to the large empires spanning Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Maybe certain Latin American countries, except some of them joined the war at the end and/or took in Nazi refugees like Eichmann.
You can find complicity in the holocaust everywhere. The United States strictly enforced immigration quotas and turned away entire refugee ships. Legislation to address the issue and provide an exception failed in the house in 1939. Those people were returned to their deaths.
After the war, the genuine shock of what was discovered by the Army was presented to imply that nobody had any idea what was happening.
The Swiss also turned a blind eye to allied activity. The OSS and MI6 operated pretty blatantly and received some assistance from the Swiss authorities.
The Swiss cannot claim moral superiority by any means, but it’s unfair to brand them as nazi collaborators. These issues are black and white a hundred years later and thousands of miles away, not so much when you’re surrounded.